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Flow-rate acceleration

How to secure a dramatic improvement in throughput on lower costs: production, operations, services:

1. The problem in flow systems is the variation in the flow-rates of different steps in different process flows.
2. The intuitive solution is to maximise performance everywhere, under the assumption that this will translate to maximum whole-system performance.
3. The consequences are high inventories, low throughput and long lead-time, because the performance of any flow-system is limited by a single bottleneck.
4. The counter-intuitive solution is to maximise productivity at the bottleneck, reduce performance everywhere else to synchronise to it and protect only the bottleneck with inventory, removing it from everywhere else.
5. The prosequences (inevitable good results) are maximum throughput, minimum inventory and reduced lead-time, because end-to-end performance is determined by the bottleneck and any inventory not protecting the bottleneck is unnecessary.